Human tragedy can inspire the strongest partnership of religious leadership within communities across the globe. When tragedy strikes local communities, it is the religious first-responders who have relationships within the community and with the families, who must forgo grief by being present with the grieving. These are the ones who end up in firehouses and morgues, standing with others during the most wrenching moments of their lives. The hard “why” questions are usually immediate and exacting, and nothing is easy.

In 2012, from murders in a Sikh Gurdwara, to a movie theatre in Colorado, to the murdered children and educators in Newtown, Connecticut, amidst tragedy this country witnessed heroic religious leadership in its towns and cities. Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, Jews, Muslims and more, found their leaders confronted by the hardest circumstances of consoling the living and burying the dead, alongside responding to the inconsolable who…